Shadows (29 page)

“I’m a werewolf,” said Takahiro matter-of-factly.

The car did a tiny zigzag, but only a tiny one. “A werewolf,” Jill said cautiously. “This isn’t a joke, right?”

“No,” said Taks. “It’s not a joke. And stress makes me turn. This armydar stresses me hard.”

“Yeah,” said Jill. “The scans were never like this. It makes me feel like a silverbug with the zapper turned on. The
animal
shelter?”

I had a headache. Maybe it was the armydar. Maybe I was going to turn into a turkey or a mutant chipmunk. “I don’t understand how any of this works, okay? But the
gruuaa
suck up random energy or they block the fact that stuff the niddles aren’t going to like is present or something like that. Oh, Val’s a magician,” I added, and the car did another zigzag.

“He can’t be,” Jill said, sounding increasingly stressed herself. “They’d’ve never let him into the country.”

“Gruuaa,”
I said. “He came with a lot of
gruuaa.
”

“Those shadows on the shed,” said Jill, remembering.

“Yeah,” I said. “He didn’t know. He didn’t know they were there till—till night before last.” Jill shot me a look but didn’t interrupt. I went on: “He’s been teaching dead batteries that the square root of ninety-six is double fudge cake with buttercream frosting—”

Jill snorted.

“—and people like Taks that—that science can
make
the square root of ninety-six be double fudge cake with buttercream frosting—”

“For the record,” said Takahiro, “my project is about how we define the integrity of one world as differentiated from another.”

“Holy electricity,” said Jill. “You don’t want much, do you?”

“—and back wherever Val is from he was . . . I guess he was a pretty big machine.”

“Not machine,” said Jill. “Magician.”

“Whatever,” I said. “But the
gruuaa
are working really hard and Taks is still not happy, you know? Neither am I. And I didn’t like that scanner thing at all, and the way it almost . . . And Mongo really liked Taks . . . um . . .”

“As a wolf,” said Takahiro. “Yeah. I noticed that. Kay’s cat avoids me like—well, avoids me for weeks after, but she would, wouldn’t she? She’s a cat.”

“As a
wolf?
” squeaked Jill. I could see her clutching the steering wheel but the car didn’t zigzag this time.

“Yeah,” said Takahiro. “Yesterday. Val saved my life. And after . . . these are his
gruuaa.
” He did that vague touching thing you do when you’re groping in the dark for something that is probably fragile, if you can find it. “He sent them home with me.”

“And when we took him home, the soldiers at the corner stopped us, but Mongo sat in Taks’ lap and I think that helped too,” I said. “Val has tutorials till about six tonight. So we go to the shelter first. Where I’m hoping whatever—er—the armydar either puts out or picks up may be a little more confused. If it works we might even adopt someone.”

“Do you have a wolfhound?” said Takahiro.

“Yes, actually,” I said. “Her name’s Bella. She’s one of the Family. They have to turn the armydar off eventually, don’t they?”

“Mom says it can be weeks if it’s a big cobey,” said Jill unhappily. “First there was Copperhill and now—well, whatever they think happened, they’re slapping us down hard with this new amped-up armydar.”

“What’s it supposed to
do
?” I said. I think I may have howled.

“It’s supposed to stop it—them—from spreading. Cobeys. They run in series,” said Jill. “I guess they think yesterday was trying to be a second cobey.”

“Does everyone but me know that cobeys run in series?” I said. Takahiro’s hands had found something and were cradling it. It was liking this: it twinkled. But I was pretty sure he’d heard “weeks.” Maybe he already knew.

“Everybody who doesn’t zone out and end up in Enhanced Algebra with the biggest textbook on the planet, yes,” said Jill.

Jill turned in through the shelter gate. Rob Roy and Gertrude were barking, but Rob Roy and Gertrude were always barking. Clare came out of the office but her face cleared when she recognized us. “I could really use some help,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’re all here to work? The army have been here half the day—it’s an animal shelter, are they expecting me to be hiding a cobey generator in an empty kennel?—and nothing’s done.”

“Sure,” said Jill. “I can spare a couple of hours.”

“Cats don’t like me much,” said Takahiro. “I’m okay with dogs.”

“Can you face cleaning kennels?” said Clare, looking up at him and smiling.

He smiled back. Good. Maybe the shelter had been one of my better ideas. “Can’t be worse than Mrs. Andover,” he said.

Clare laughed. “Joan Andover? She was a dead battery when she was your age and still Joan Ricco. I’d rather clean kennels too.”

• • •

It
was
better at the shelter. Clare was completely obsessed, and spent all her spare time getting grants from various animal charities and papering downtown with posters for volunteer dog walkers and special critter-education events—that’s human education about critters, you know, not the other way around—and open days, and as a result the animals at the Orchard Shelter were a lot happier and better socialized than in most shelters. (Or a lot of people’s homes, but we won’t go there.) The turnover for all the standard adoptable critters was high but Clare managed to sort of
solder
the ones that were too old or too ugly or too large or too cranky or too something into a kind of on-site family—the Family—which sometimes made them so charming to susceptible visitors a few of them got adopted after all. (Some of these also got brought back. Clare never refused a returnee.) But the
soldering
thing—I think it made a kind of critter-energy net. You felt it—okay,
I
felt it—as you turned up the driveway and through the gate that had
Orchard Shelter
on the left-hand post. I was hoping that even the armydar would have trouble punching through it.

Takahiro and I were sent out to the kennels. I showed him how it worked and let him get on with it. I hoped the dogs wouldn’t mind Taks’
gruuaa
escort, if Mongo’s reaction to them was any guide. I kept the slightly dubious-tempered ones for myself. It seemed to go okay. I could hear him making the occasional comment about the weather and tonight’s homework. I grinned. Critter therapy is the big bang. I was even relaxing a little myself.

It was just after five-thirty when the
gruuaa
suddenly went crazy. The room filled up with small bursting stars, so many and so bright they made me dizzy, or maybe it was the odd scattered wind, or winds, which were sort of semi-something, like the
gruuaa
themselves were semi-something, which was so disorienting. It was like wherever they were really from was suddenly much closer than usual.

I’d been at the grooming table brushing Florrie, who was probably a Shetland sheepdog and was definitely more hair than dog. I dropped the dog brush and it went
thud
on the floor and skittered a little way, like any ordinary thing, wooden back and plastic bristles and a strap for your hand . . . like any ordinary thing . . . like . . .

The brush stopped when it ran into my algebra book. Which I’d left in Clare’s office with my knapsack.

The tiny exploding stars thinned out and disappeared, but I felt almost as sick as if I’d stepped on a silverbug. I couldn’t see or feel any of the
gruuaa,
not even Hix. Florrie twisted around so she could lick my hands in a “pardon me but don’t just stand there” way. I let go of her and bent slowly down to pick up the grooming brush. I had to hold onto the table. I had to bend over a second time to pick up my algebra book.

I put the book carefully on the counter. It didn’t seem right leaving it on the floor, even if the floor had been its choice. Maybe it couldn’t leap, but only slither or waddle. I moved around the table so I could keep an eye on it while I went on brushing Florrie but I was worried about Hix. No, here she was, shinnying up me like a kid up a tree. If she weighed more I’d’ve said she flopped across my shoulders, but it was hard to say “flop” about something that landed as hard as dandelion fluff. “You okay, sweetie?” I said, and Florrie wagged her tail—
keep brushing
—but I was talking to Hix. “What was that about? Where are the rest of you? Is Taks all right?” Nobody was barking, so I wanted to assume nothing too awful had happened, although I didn’t know what domestic dogs might do if suddenly confronted with a wolf: flatten themselves into doormats and hope for the best, maybe.

I hadn’t realized how accustomed I’d become to the presence of
gruuaa
—or how sharply I’d notice their absence. How much heavier and more ominous the air was without them. I didn’t like the sensation that Hix had buried her face under my hair at the back of my neck, the way an unhappy dog will put his head under your arm.

I was feeling the armydar more strongly again, like the return of a fever you’d hoped had gone away for good. I could guess that Takahiro was feeling it too. It was nearly six o’clock, so time we went home and looked for Val. (And Mongo, who was used to coming with me to the shelter, and would reach the destructive stage of tragic mode soon.) I was carefully not thinking beyond that point.

What was I expecting Val to do? He couldn’t stop Takahiro from being a werewolf, or being stressed out by the armydar, and he couldn’t shut the armydar down. And two nights ago he hadn’t even known he was still a magician. Whatever that meant. For the first time since all this began—since meeting Casimir, since really talking to Val for the first time, since Hix, since the Copperhill cobey—I remembered that Aunt Gwenda’s house was called Haven. She’d told me when I was still really little that its name had originally been Witchhaven. They’d changed it to just Haven after they cut the magic gene out of everybody in Newworld—and
witch
became a word you didn’t use in polite company. (If you had to say anything, you said
magician.
) At the time my interest level in this information was a degree or two below “do you want a peanut butter or roast beef sandwich for lunch?” But I’d remembered it. I also remembered my mother saying, irritated but also uncomfortable, to my dad, as we bumped down the long narrow driveway after a visit to Haven, that one of the reasons she loved him was because he was so normal. I wondered if I counted as normal any more. Val didn’t.

I finished Florrie and put her back in her run. She sighed, shook herself all over, and collapsed on her bed. I envied her. I picked up my algebra book and went to look for Takahiro and Jill. Maybe it had just been time for the
gruuaa
to all go do—something. The stars and the weird wind and everything were their version of the late bell at school.

The three of us met up and headed back to the office to sign off with Clare. I was clutching the algebra book like it was my last friend, and while Hix had looped herself around my neck again I still felt that most of her was curled up under my hair. “You didn’t take your algebra book up to the kennels, did you?” said Jill.

“No,” I said.

“I didn’t think so,” said Jill.

Takahiro was walking more and more slowly down the little hill to the office and the front gate. Jill was giving him the same worried looks that I was. “What happened with the
gruuaa
?” she said. “They all just kind of cleared off about a quarter hour ago.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Um—what did you see?”

We were walking so slowly she had time to think about it. “It was like being caught in an electric storm,” she said finally. “I think my hair sizzled. I didn’t like it.”

When we got to the office building the Family were lying over all available surfaces. It was after public hours so the barrier gate was open. Most of the dogs rolled immediately to their feet and came over to say hello. Bella was tall enough that Takahiro could pet her without bending over—although Jonesie had the answer to that one by rearing up and putting his front feet on Takahiro’s stomach. Jonesie is a Staffie cross—Staffordshire crossed with Sasquatch—and he wants you to know he is a dog of power and influence. The cats withdrew to the far side of the room and hissed.

“Off,”
said Clare, making a grab at Jonesie. She glanced at the cats, clustered at the far end of the bay window and making a sound like a nest of snakes. “I guess you’re not kidding about cats not liking you,” she said. “But the dogs are making up for it, aren’t they?” Jonesie was back on all fours, but his place had been taken by Athena the greyhound, who, with her feet on Takahiro’s chest, was licking his face. Clare sighed, but Takahiro was (gently) pulling Athena’s ears and Athena, not a big tail wagger, was wagging her tail. I could see him unstiffening, but as Clare went off to raid the cash box to pay us, Takahiro looked at me and said softly, “I don’t think I can do this.”

“Do what?” I said, but I knew. Where were the
gruuaa
? What else had happened?

“I don’t suppose there’s any chance—no,” said Takahiro. “I could just sleep on the couch.”

“No,” I said. “But we can take some of them with us. Clare’s got lots of spares.”

“What?” said Jill. “You mean in my car?”

“We’ll take the ones who don’t throw up,” I said.

“Oh, thanks,” said Jill. “I’m so relieved.
Why
are we taking them with us?”

“The
gruuaa
are all gone. All but Hix.” Jill’s eyes rested on my collarbones. She nodded.

“And the armydar—makes Taks, um, sick,” I said, conscious of Clare maybe being in earshot.
Gruuaa
could just be a weird teenage word.
Werewolf
she’d hear. “The
gruuaa
were kind of holding it off.”

“Sick,” said Jill. “Okay. And it can’t be good news that they’re gone either, right?”

Clare came back and shoved some money at us. “I need a favor,” I said. “I need to borrow some of the Family.”

“Borrow?” said Clare. “You know I’d let you adopt any of them in a second. Half a second. Adopt two and I’ll throw in a free set of steak knives. Adopt all of them and I’ll help you build the fence.”